Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies (38 page)

Pleasant ran into Iggy Pop a few times and he was charming, but she'd been too nervous to attempt meaningful chatter. It had been over a year since she last encountered him. Between Devo's sets, her editor at Slash excitedly told Pleasant that Iggy Pop was in the audience. "`You know him, right? Go ask him for an interview!' I said, `Well, I know him, but I don't really know him.' I had toppled over a balcony the night before and I felt ugly, fat, young, and stupid, with bruises on one side of my face, and this big bandage with stitches. I looked like a pudgy baby prizefighter, you know? I had on a Spiderman T-shirt with safety pins all over it and striped stockings with Converse high tops. I was embarrassed but went up to him. `Hi, would you like to do an interview for Slash? Do you remember me?' and he said, `Of course, why wouldn't I remember you! Why don't you just say hi like you're a human being?' We started talking and he said, `What are you doing after this?' He was with Toni Basil, David Bowie's choreographer, totally fucking Black Dahlia beautiful, with a giant orchid in her hair, and two tall, gorgeous, long-haired Farrah-y blondes wearing nice dresses. I felt like an idiot, so he says, `What are you doing afterward? Wanna go to the Whisky?" She was thrilled, but had come with Pat Random of Dangerhouse Records, and didn't want to be rude. Then Iggy asked her to meet him at Barney's Beanery, and she told him she would have to bring her date. "This guy was all excited because it was Iggy, and when we were getting his car from the parking lot, we saw Iggy driving this huge '60s white convertible, a giant fucking tank, with Toni Basil and the two girls. It was just the picture of glamour."

Pleasant wanted to stop for cigarettes, and as she was going into the liquor store, she was surprised to see Iggy coming out. "He said, `Let's ditch everybody and go see the Dictators at the Whisky, come on!' Iggy and Pleasant abandoned their dates and soon she was smack dab in that dreamy, incandescent picture of glamour, zooming through the night in the big white convertible. The Whisky was packed, so Iggy invited her to his pad in Malibu. "We were driving through that greenery part of Beverly Hills, and he had his arm around me. He was being super-nice and I was really stoked, but a little weirded out that we had ditched people."

It got bone chilly cruising through Pacific Palisades, so Iggy gallantly pulled over to manually yank up the top, fiddling with the numerous old-fashioned snaps. "I was sitting there wondering `What do I do now?' Then he looks at me and says, `I feel like Richie Cunningham in Happy Days.'"

Iggy was exuberant and upbeat about his upcoming trip to Berlin to record The Idiot with David Bowie. In fact, Bowie had rented the house in Malibu, which was quite different from the seedy apartment on Flores-more in keeping with Pleasant's idea of how the venerated shock-rocker should live.

"He opened some red wine and we walked out to this rock jetty and sat down and talked about communism, the Romanoffs, Russian deconstructive arts, Berlin, cabaret, and Sally Bowlesbecause he was going to Germany. We talked about loneliness. I mean, we were discussing really deep shit, but I don't have the full-on gist of the conversation because we were pretty drunk."

Back at the pad, Iggy played Pleasant demos of his new music. "Then he said, `Let's go to sleep,' and we went to bed and had sex, like, seven times. It was insane! I hadn't experienced anything like that yet. I also had nothing to compare it to-at least not on that level. I had been having sex, but I'd go with someone, try a door on someone's nice car-if it was open, we'd climb in the back seat and have sex. Anyway, Iggy was totally fucking awesome, he has a great body, which everybody knows, and a really huge dick."

The next day, Iggy asked Pleasant if she'd like to move in for a while. Since she still lived at home, she told him she would commute back and forth. "The first time I stayed three or four days, and this guy, David, was also living there, acting like a houseboy. I'd sit on the couch, looking at a book and when I reached for a cigarette, there'd be David with a light. One day Iggy was completely high out of his mind and David mumbled, `Oh, he's just painting.' But I didn't know what that meant. Iggy was in this insane period: he had the whole house plastered with butcher paper and he covered himself in gallons of house paint, acrylic paint, spray paint-all this shit-pouring it over himself, running to the walls and jumping against them. He was making full-on body prints."

The whole thing must have been overwhelming for a teenage girl from Middleton. "It was crazy," she agrees. "All my friends were very impressed, but I was a bit scared. I didn't know how I was supposed to act, it was so much to absorb. I hadn't been in these kinds of situations before. If I had just been ten years older ..."

Along with the lunacy, a bit of tenderness found its way in. "We were very romantically involved, and sometimes I took care of him. He asked me to get the paint off him in the shower, so I scrubbed him with a scrub brush meant for the floor. It was on in layers, peeling off in plasticky-like curls, but some wouldn't come off. It was under his nails and in his nostrils-he had dreadlocks of paint. One night we went to the Whisky and he was covered in paint. I was underage, but of course we drank loads of cocktails."

She was the baby of the duo, but Pleasant felt strangely protective of Iggy and was often concerned that he got so wasted. "I had a huge crush on him and we were having great sex, but it was beyond my realm of understanding-the amount of drugs he was doing, running into walls and stuff. In a lot of ways I acted like his mom, but he was protective of me too. It was sort of domestic bliss in a twisted way."

At the end of summer, Iggy left Malibu to record with Bowie and explore the depths of Berlin. He told Pleasant he would stay in touch, but she didn't expect him to keep his promise. When he didn't call, she didn't crumble. "It lasted on and off for the summer and it was really interesting and cool. But I didn't have any thoughts about the future-I almost couldn't believe any of it had happened anyway. There was absolutely no context to put the whole experience in. I felt sort of lucky. I wouldn't say it was a blessing, but I felt like it had been a privilege."

Iggy moved on and so did Pleasant. Her fanzine was shaking things up and she went on an extended trip to New York. "New York was run over with all these beautiful English boys, punks and teds," Pleasant recalls. "Also Sid Vicious was in town, right before the Nancy Spungen murder. We used to see him all the time. We'd look at each other, batting our eyes, saying, `Oh, he looks like a vampire, he's so tall and pretty."

When she returned to L.A., Pleasant succumbed to the extreme rockabilly charms of Levi Dexter and the Rockats. "The Rockats were all cute. They looked like horror movies in a great way. They had all these fashion models draped around them, and Marianne Faithfull sniffing around. They were the It Boys and converted the punk scene into rockabilly." There was a photo session set up with the Rockats and the girls who hung out at the Masque, but Pleasant wanted to stand out in the punked-out, green-haired leather crowd. "I thought, `I have to look like fucking Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida.' I did my nails, movie-star makeup. Instead of putting grease on my hair and spiking it, I let it be all soft. I wore this bias-cut zigzag '50s blouse, high heels, and the tightest pencil skirt I could find. I walked in there, wearing my bullet bra, and the photographer says, `Why don't you stand right between those two?' meaning Levi and Smut. It worked like a charm."

I remember when the scorching punkabilly Rockats bebopped into town with their Brit Teddy-Boy sneers and radical rockabilly pomps, helped along by Miss Mercy's scary scissors. All the girls groveled over Levi, but Pleasant's blatant charms won him over and they became a hot item. When Levi was on tour, Pleasant continued down the same rocky road, wild about a stunning British up-and-comer, Billy Idol, the lead singer for Generation X. She wrote glowing reviews in Lobotomy, then promptly sent them to his record label in London, along with spray-painted Gen-X T-shirts and a bluntly candid love letter.

Luckily, her old friend Rodney Bingenheimer was fast becoming the hipster DJ at KROQ and invited her to come to the studio the night Billy was calling in from England. "So I'm hyperventilating, and Rodney says, 'OK, someone wants to talk to you.' I say `Hello, this is Pleasant,' and Billy goes, `Oh, I got your package last week.' We were on the phone for an hour and a half."

A few weeks later, Billy came to town and didn't have a bit of trouble tracking Pleasant down. Another would-be groupie followed them around the market, trying to horn in while they were buying vodka, so Pleasant did what any self-respecting cateyed doll would do: she let the air out of her tires. She took Billy up to Runyon Canyon for a glittering view of Los Angeles. "I thought it would be a really bitchin' place to bring him because it had a crazy pirate, jungle vibe, loads of L.A. history, and you could see the whole city. We had already smoked pot, and one hit of pot to me is like three tabs of acid. We were looking at the view and it was just like, `Fuck, it's beautiful.'"

So what was it like to gaze at Billy Idol in the moonlight? "He was one of the most beautiful human beings ever. His skin was like cream. No shit, I mean, he looked like someone carved him perfectly out of pearls. His hair was white and he looked like a baby chick in a good boy way. Fucking beautiful eyes, and he was really funny. He had a great wit, a funny laugh and a sharp sense of humor. Maybe he wasn't the most cerebral person on earth, but he was quick, well read, he caught onto things and was sarcastic but not mean tempered. He had a nice skewed view on things. He could have been a big asshole but he wasn't."

As the lights twinkled below, Pleasant and Billy drank spirits, passionately made out, and thought they were alone. Then Pleasant heard rustling noises. "I was nervous in this total sixthgrade way but trying to be unflappable. From the corner of my eye, I saw this amorphous shape and screamed at the top of my lungs! I jumped on Billy, my legs wheeling around like a Roadrunner cartoon! The shape flew up, and a bum clambered out of a sleeping bag, and said, `Got a cigarette?' Any form of cool fled in that moment, and the ice was broken."

The next day Pleasant took Billy to a big bash and the insistent groupie from the market was back and wouldn't lay off. "She was being totally uncool, and I was no stranger to brawls and bar fights. Joan Jett was there and said, `I got your back,' because it looked like there was going to be a big chick fight. I don't think I was planning to set her hair on fire, and I wouldn't dream of doing it now, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. So I lit up a good chunk of her hair with a lighter." Pleasant measures about three inches with her fingers, smiling sheepishly. "Like about that much."

To raise money to print Lobotomy, my dear friend Michele Myer, who booked the Whisky, suggested Pleasant hold benefit concerts. On one of these nights, Billy was the guest of honor.

"It was just our friends helping out, but the bills were crazy-the Go-Gos, the Weirdos, the Germs. Joan Jett lived right across the street, so whenever we went to the Whisky, especially for Lobotomy nights, we'd prime the pump at her house. Gil Turner's Liquor delivered booze, even though no one was even close to twenty-one, because we'd answer the door in black underwear with handcuff belts and high heels. We'd start the order with a gallon of vodka and get blitzed. On this night Billy came over to Joan's, and we fucking outdid ourselves. We had this girl, Nancy, tied to the bed with socks and sheets and clotheslines. There were three or four different kinds of whips. We were all on Quaaludes, and the Sex Pistols were blasting. The front door was open and the coffee table was covered in beer bottles. The show must have been really late: we heard this yelling, and Michele Myer came from the Whisky and burst into Joan's apartment. She saw all the beer bottles, the trail of clothes, and Nancy spread-eagle bare on the bed. Billy was holding a gallon of vodka and a cat o' nine tails in mid-swing. She yells, `You-the show producer-get to the fucking Whisky. You-the stage manager-get to the fucking Whisky. And you-the fucking guest of honor ..: she screams at Billy, shaking her finger. And he says, `Sorry, madam."'

Pleasant spent some sincere quality time with Billy. Then his acclaimed gal pal Peri Lister came to town. "I was totally crushed out, but she was so beautiful. I pretty much wanted to sleep with both of them, but didn't know how you went about doing that. I had slept with my girlfriends and a guy, but never a guy I had a crush on and a girl I didn't know who was his girlfriend. He said he had to spend time with her and that was fine. I mean, I had no claim on him. I'm not like a guy, where the conquest is all, but that was a great, crazy conquest."

All the while Pleasant romped with Billy Idol, Levi Dexter was conveniently on tour. "Oh, he was in England fucking someone else, or actually he might have been in New York at that point with Belinda from the Go-Gos. I told her to fuck him so he wouldn't fuck some stupid girl. I mean, we totally switched, and I took care of her boyfriend, Bill Bateman from the Blasters. This was the way you kept people true in the '80s, right? Have them fuck your best friend. I think Jane also fucked Levi, but in the late '70s/early'80s, 'cause of Quaaludes and coke. It was like free love in leather. We shared boyfriends and crushes, it was no biggie. It was just a crazy pass-around. I either had sex with or made out with most of the girls I knew, like Belinda and Jane. I actually had a little affair with Jane that started one night when we locked ourselves in a bedroom at somebody's parents' house. While Levi and the Rockats jammed with the Rockabilly Rebels, Jane and I had a long make-out lesbo session, and it went on for a while after that."

High jinks aside, when the long arm of the law threatened to deport Levi, extreme measures were called for. "We decided to get married because he had been coming in and out of the country so much and they weren't gonna let him back in. I was almost twenty and I couldn't imagine not seeing him anymore. We had a huge ceremony at Cathay de Grande, the punk club, when I was booking it. The wedding was at a Unitarian Church. Bill Bateman of the Blasters was one of the best men, Belinda was the maid of honor, and all the bridesmaids were in leather. Our wedding was mistakenly scheduled at the same time as a low-rider wedding that had powder blue tuxedos and matching carnations. We tossed a coin and our wedding came up first. I thought, `Cool, we get the blue flowers!'-Levi had blue hair at that point. My wedding dress was a Salvation Army white prom dress, my hair was white, and I had a big white veil. The wedding was just insane and the reception was even crazier-a total who's who of the punk scene." Someone special was on hand to lend a yowl to the festivities. "Billy Idol was there, screaming `White Wedding.' And he's the one who caught the garter!"